Principal Software Engineering Manager

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Locations

Remote, United Kingdom

Overview

GitHub is shaping the future of software development in the age of AI agents — and search is at the heart of it.

As GitHub's lexical and semantic code search engine, Blackbird powers context retrieval for business‑critical experiences across the platform and our Copilot products, including Cloud Agent, Code Review, Copilot CLI, and VS Code.

We're looking for a Principal Engineering Manager to lead the development of Blackbird. You'll be part of our Copilot Agents organization, positively impacting millions of software developers and AI agents around the world who are building everything from open source to global enterprises.

Responsibilities

Drive and execute technical roadmap that aligns with product goals, ensuring engineering efforts are strategically prioritized and incorporate new technologies and methodologies where applicable.
Work with organizational leaders to shape GitHub’s AI product portfolio, identifying opportunities for innovation and leading initiatives that scale globally.
Drive employee growth and development, manage performance, and ensure the engineering team's skills remain current by staying abreast of industry developments and best practices.
Own incident response and reliability practices, ensuring live services meet SLOs and postmortems drive systemic improvements; oversee capacity planning to ensure performance, reliability, and compliance.
Champion experimentation and telemetry‑driven development, enabling rapid iteration and data‑informed decisions.
Identify novel bottlenecks in AI‑powered development workflows to improve team and organizational impact.
Drive engineering excellence through automation, tooling, and standardization across deployment, testing, and operations; facilitate cross‑team communications, identify dependencies, and resolve conflicts to ensure seamless integration and support across products, applications, and services.
Partner with stakeholders such as product managers and technical leads to determine requirements for services or complex scenarios, leveraging feedback channels to incorporate insights into future designs.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

11+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python.
OR Associate’s Degree in a related field and 10+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python.
OR Bachelor's Degree in a related field and 9+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python.
OR Master's Degree in a related field and 7+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python.
OR PhD in a related field and 5+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python.
OR equivalent experience.
5+ years of people management experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

Experience building or operating web‑scale search, information retrieval, or context retrieval systems.
Expertise with systems programming languages, ideally Rust.
Proven track record of building and scaling engineering organizations in high‑growth or ambiguous environments.
Experience designing or integrating AI/ML‑powered features into production systems.

Equal Employment Opportunity

GitHub is made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and lifestyles. We embrace diversity and invite applications from people of all walks of life. We don't discriminate against employees or applicants based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, national origin, citizenship, disability, pregnancy status, veteran status, or any other differences. Also, if you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you; we're happy to accommodate!

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Company: GitHub

Apply for the Principal Software Engineering Manager

Location:

Job Description:

Locations

Remote, United Kingdom

Overview

GitHub is shaping the future of software development in the age of AI agents — and search is at the heart of it.

As GitHub’s lexical and semantic code search engine, Blackbird powers context retrieval for business‑critical experiences across the platform and our Copilot products, including Cloud Agent, Code Review, Copilot CLI, and VS Code.

We’re looking for a Principal Engineering Manager to lead the development of Blackbird. You’ll be part of our Copilot Agents organization, positively impacting millions of software developers and AI agents around the world who are building everything from open source to global enterprises.

Responsibilities

Drive and execute technical roadmap that aligns with product goals, ensuring engineering efforts are strategically prioritized and incorporate new technologies and methodologies where applicable.
Work with organizational leaders to shape GitHub’s AI product portfolio, identifying opportunities for innovation and leading initiatives that scale globally.
Drive employee growth and development, manage performance, and ensure the engineering team’s skills remain current by staying abreast of industry developments and best practices.
Own incident response and reliability practices, ensuring live services meet SLOs and postmortems drive systemic improvements; oversee capacity planning to ensure performance, reliability, and compliance.
Champion experimentation and telemetry‑driven development, enabling rapid iteration and data‑informed decisions.
Identify novel bottlenecks in AI‑powered development workflows to improve team and organizational impact.
Drive engineering excellence through automation, tooling, and standardization across deployment, testing, and operations; facilitate cross‑team communications, identify dependencies, and resolve conflicts to ensure seamless integration and support across products, applications, and services.
Partner with stakeholders such as product managers and technical leads to determine requirements for services or complex scenarios, leveraging feedback channels to incorporate insights into future designs.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

11+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python.
OR Associate’s Degree in a related field and 10+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python.
OR Bachelor’s Degree in a related field and 9+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python.
OR Master’s Degree in a related field and 7+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python.
OR PhD in a related field and 5+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related discipline with proven experience maintaining and delivering production software in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python.
OR equivalent experience.
5+ years of people management experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

Experience building or operating web‑scale search, information retrieval, or context retrieval systems.
Expertise with systems programming languages, ideally Rust.
Proven track record of building and scaling engineering organizations in high‑growth or ambiguous environments.
Experience designing or integrating AI/ML‑powered features into production systems.

Equal Employment Opportunity

GitHub is made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and lifestyles. We embrace diversity and invite applications from people of all walks of life. We don’t discriminate against employees or applicants based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, national origin, citizenship, disability, pregnancy status, veteran status, or any other differences. Also, if you have a disability, please let us know if there’s any way we can make the interview process better for you; we’re happy to accommodate!

#J-18808-Ljbffr…

Posted: May 20th, 2026